Ebola Syndrome

Anthony Wong plays a really sick fuck named Ah Kai, an ex-con who makes the stupid mistake of having sex with the boss’ girlfriend. Trying to save his own ass, he goes and murders everyone in the house, even the almost-burning of a young child. On the run, he goes to Africa, where he rapes an African girl that gives him the Ebola virus. Strangely enough, he does not become sick from the thing. Instead, he becomes a living carrier, like the monkey in Outbreak, and goes around spreading the disease to everyone in Hong Kong, first by killing and infecting a gang of criminals and serving them as food for the restaurant, then by random casual sex. Will the police be able to get to him in time?

This movie is the epitome of the Cat III film, a rather brutal subgenre in Hong Kong cinema reserved exclusively for movies that cross the edge of bad taste. This one has it all. First, let’s start with our Ah Kai character. He’s one of the biggest scumbags in the history of cinema, a vain and self-serving psychopath who cares about nobody but his own. Anthony Wong is famous for playing sick fucks (The Untold Story, hello!) but here he goes even farther in his psychotics. Every woman he meets he sexually assaults, from the beautiful and willing, then raping a dying African girl (which gets him infected with Ebola) and then a woman who works at the restaurant he works in. It’s all in bad taste and it revels in it’s offensiveness. There is a lot of gore, if you have the original unedited version. The best examples of these are the opening when our ‘hero’ stomps a guy to death with a table, then cuts his girlfriend’s tongue out with scissors. The only scene that made me gag, however, was an autopsy sequence where the doctor is operating on a sick patient. All the guts and viscera look putrefied and rotten. Almost lost my lunch.

Of course, with a CAT III film like this, you really can’t take things too damn seriously. After all, we are talking about a movie about a guy who spreads the Ebola virus while he himself is immune to his effects. The movie has a lot of racist overtones, as most of the African people are seen as backward and idiotic, and the scenes in Africa look like they were obviously shot at a nature park. This isn’t really a negative thing, since it adds to the craziness of the material. This movie has it all: it’s un-PC, it’s violent, it’s full of sex, violence, gore and even black humor. It’s the best of Hong Kong’s CAT III horror cinema and comes highly recommended.